A response to the Iraqi death toll diaries:

In the following I try to offer some food for thought concerning a body-count morality.

I should start off by saying that I served in Iraq for 14 months, killed and was nearly killed several times. I hate this war and want to see it end immediately, but the Lancet number that is being pushed is simply not believable.

March 20 2003 plus 4 years,

Plus 24 days in this fourth year

Plus one leap day.

1486 days.

655,000 divided by 1486 = 441 per day.

A typical terrible day in Iraq does not yield that much carnage, but let's assume that it did.

The total number of deaths of Iraqis over a four year period is not attributable to the US alone, nor only to effects of a war and occupation. Even if it were true that 655,000 Iraqis have died since March 2003 (as if anyone really knows), many would have died regardless.

Let's say that the difference between the amount of people that did die and the amount of people that would have dies had we done nothing is blood on American hands; would it make the war the right thing to have done if only one innocent person died? Would the war have been right if it turned out that we had a net savings of life? Ostensibly we started this war on those very same grounds.

One ought not arrive at moral conclusions from death calculations: if we had to defend ourselves from a palpable threat (such as Hitler was) 65 million dead would be justified.

Similarly, if you had a crystal ball that told you that an American withdrawal would lead to 20 million Iraqi deaths in 10 years, while the occupation would result in merely 2 million Iraqi deaths, would continuing the occupation become moral to you?

We who advocate withdrawal have to be honest about this question, because nobody knows the future, or can reason through the chain of events that will result from our actions. We hope that we are right, but may be that withdrawal will really backfire and we will have egg on our faces: I am prepared for whatever comes, are you?

In the end, we can still make our case with numbers closer to the truth. I balk at the impetus to overlook so-called "lesser truths" for "higher truths". That tendency reveals a moral wildness and hubris that is eerily similar to the neo-cons, the Bolsheviks, and the Jacobins. I don't like it.

I'll put it to you in a poll: